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Sam. Saint Gonna change one of these days. Welcome, friends, to another edition of Economic Update, a weekly program devoted to the jobs, the incomes, the debts, the prospects for our kids, all those things that go under the heading Economic Dimensions of Our Lives. I'm your host, Richard Wolff. I've been a professor of economics all my adult life, and currently I teach at the New School University in New York City. Let's jump right in. This is the Thanksgiving weekend, and while we have much to give thanks for, not the least of those is the opportunity to talk with one another honestly about what's going on in our economic system. One of the hot issues for weeks now has been the economics of immigration. Well, to be more honest, it's about immigration in general. Immigration, particularly by refugees driven from their homelands by unbelievable economic distress, coupled with political and military interventions that are often beyond what we can imagine, if we've been so lucky as not to have these kinds of problems in our own lives. So I wanted to talk a little bit about the economics of immigration. The economics that make people leave their homes, the places where they were born, where they know family, friends, where they know the customs and the cultures, where they have a job, where they feel comfortable, speak the language, all of that. Leave all of that and go to another place where they don't know whether or what kind of job they will ever have, what kind of income they will have, whether it's even safe to be there, who will be there with them for people to make that kind of a move, you know that the conditions where they are must be unspeakably difficult in order to take the risks, suffer the costs that are involved in being a refugee or being an immigrant of any kind. And we've seen lots of immigration in the last 30 or 40 years, from the various parts of the world to another. It's a phenomena everywhere, and it reflects a global economic system that is making life unlivable for large numbers of people now here, now there. But it's a general problem and should not be confused with the specific conditions which in each case make it happen there as opposed to somewhere else. So what can we say in a more general way about the economics of immigration? I think one of the least understood aspects or causes of these issues is our capitalist system. And once again, I'm going to be able to show you, I think, how this system produces certain of the problems we face. And I don't do that because I enjoy finding fault with capitalism. That's not very difficult to do. What I'm doing it for Is if we recognize a problem and we understand what a contributing cause is, we'll be better able to solve the problem. We'll come up with a solution because we understand where it comes from and why it happens. And that's the point. Over the last 30 to 40 years, capitalist enterprises, particularly big ones, and particularly those in the dominant parts of the global economy, Western Europe, North America and Japan, have gotten into a competitive struggle with one another that has led them to look for ways to save themselves in that competitive struggle, to gain an advantage if they can, in that competitive struggle by finding ways to produce whatever they make at lower cost. And chief goal there is to find a way to pay workers less in wages and salaries and thereby make a better profit, thereby maybe lower your price so as to out compete the other producer who hasn't yet found cheaper workers, lower paid workers, etc. So what capitalists have done is basically offered the world, as a result of their competition, the following. We will compete with one another by leaving Western Europe, North America and Japan and moving to where the wages are much lowerchina, India, Brazil, Africa and so on. So that's what we're going to do. But say the capitalists to the world, we have an option of an alternative that would also allow us to pursue this competitive struggle. Instead of moving to where the workers are low paid, we can bring the low paid workers to where we already are. And that's called immigration. If you don't go to Asia, you bring Asians to North America, Western Europe and Japan, and ditto all the other parts of the world. Basically, we're being told by capitalism and its competitive big businesses, you have a choice. For the last 30 years, until recently, the basic movement was from North America, Western Europe and Japan to areas of the world where wages were cheap, particularly Asia, but other parts as well. But then the mass of people began to protest. Their jobs were disappearing, their incomes were disappearing. Countries began noticing that there were Detroits and Clevelands and Camden's and cities completely wrecked by the departure of businesses to capture lower wages someplace else. And a criticism of globalization developed because globalization was the fancy term to cover the export of jobs to where wages were low. Okay, said the capitalists, if you're going to make it hard for us to leave, we'll bring the poor people here so we can pay lower wages that way. Fundamentally, then the issue is capitalism. If we don't want either to to suffer the loss of jobs as industry moves to where the wages are cheap, or the social problems that go with massive immigration of poor people into a society that hasn't the infrastructure or the commitment to be a decent host. If we don't want to be in either of those positions, we have to confront the problem where it originates, in the profit driven competition among big businesses. Because they're the ones that are confronting the rest of us with this choice. If they didn't have to do that, if we didn't have businesses driven by profit and competition, we wouldn't face this absurd choice and be trapped within it. Second update I want to spend a few minutes on with you has to do with a strange debate. It arrives periodically, flares, then kind of dribbles away, and then a few years later returns. Let me describe it to you this. On the one hand, there are alarmists, people who look at the economy and begin to shout an alarm. Capitalism, they say, is collapsing. The world economy is disintegrating, our jobs are disappearing, our incomes crashing. You get the picture. Are there people who overstate all of that? Yes. Are there the alarmists for whom the sky is falling? The sky is falling is a kind of mantra that they repeat. Yes, there are such folks, but they have their equivalent on the other side. And the other side is the more dominant one in our culture. And here's what the other side don't pay attention to the alarmists. There's always a few people who see the the blight side of things. We're here to tell you that our capitalist system is fundamentally healthy, fundamentally in good shape, fundamentally on a growth path. We don't have to worry. Don't listen to these crazy alarmists. Dismiss them out of hand. What I want to tell you is it's just as irrational to dismiss the alarmist. It is to be an alarmist that these are not the either ors that any of us have to choose between, because they both make a fundamental mistake. First, capitalism is in fact a highly unstable economic system. You don't need to be an alarmist to say that. You just need to pay attention to history. Capitalism as a system is 2 to 300 years old, begins in England back in the 18th century, more or less, and then spreads to the rest of the world over the last 250 years, more or less. The dates are not crucial. Wherever capitalism has become the dominant system, starting in England and then everywhere else, it has been unstable. It has had an economic downturn every three to seven years. Some of them are short and shallow, others of them are long and deep. The biggest two so far were the great crash of 1929 that lasted throughout the 1930s, the so called great Depression. And the second worst is the one we're in now, the one that crashed in 2008 and is very much still with us. But there have been many, many other economic downturns, 11 for example, between the end of the Great Depression and, and the one that hit in 2008. So it's a highly unstable system. For anyone seriously to say that we don't have to worry that the capitalism we lived in is going to crash simply flies in the face of our history. Everything has been done in the history of capitalism to try to solve this problem, to prevent the system from crashing, to prevent these regular downturns that throw millions of people out of work, that drive thousands of enterprises into bankruptcy, and so on. The greatest economist of the 20th century, John Maynard Keynes, a British trained economist teaching at Cambridge University in England, came up with a very brilliant analysis and a whole host of policies, monetary policies and fiscal policies designed to manage a capitalist economy so that we wouldn't have these downturns. It failed. We're in one now. That's the proof. The rest is detail. We have every kind of reform that's been passed, every kind of regulation, before the New Deal, during the New Deal, in the years of the last 20 to 30 years. They don't work. The best you can say for them is they might have made these downturns less frequent, maybe less horrible, maybe, but fundamentally, stop it. Fundamentally prevent us from being in a crazy economic system that periodically produces what, let's be real clear, friends, it produces the situation we have now. Millions of people who want a job, nothing more, nothing less, a job. Huge part of our tools, equipment and raw materials sitting idle. Currently, according to the Federal Reserve in The United States, 20% of our tools, equipment, raw materials, factory space, office space, and all the rest are sitting useless, doing nothing, wasting away. And could we use the output that those millions of people who want a job and those tools and equipment that are available could make possible? Of course we do. To rebuild our cities, to take care of our children, to do something for our aging population. We can all make the list. A system that periodically produces this irrational juxtaposition of unemployed people, unused resources and unmet social needs is something about which you ought to be critical. It's not about being an alarmist, knowing that the world is going to end next week or next month, but to dismiss the alarmists as if we've got a fundamentally healthy system we don't have to worry about. That's just silly. Okay, in the time that we have left. Let me quickly go through a couple more economic updates and then respond to your questions. I wanted to bring you all to an awareness that the European countries are really ganging up these days on Ireland. And I wanted to tell you why the Irish have taken the lead. They're not the only place to do this, but they're a major player in this game of dropping down their tax rates. Now, that's very dangerous for a country to do for two reasons. One, it bankrupts the government. It means that the government is not raising money from corporations because it drops the tax on them. And that tends to do one of two things or both of them. One, it means that the government hasn't got the money to provide social services to the mass of people, or it has to tax the average person more to make up for what it is, not taxing the big corporations. Well, then why did Ireland do that? The answer is simple. It wants those corporations to bring business to Ireland to locate their offices, their storehouses, their factories, if they can in Ireland because that will produce more jobs for the Irish, even at the expense of the French or the Germans or the Americans who are being left behind. In the end, this game is horrible for the average person. Why? Because it makes every government compete with Ireland. How do you keep your industries in Belgium or France or Germany or Italy or United States or Canada? How do you keep them from going to Ireland and paying to the Irish government the taxes there rather than in your country? Well, you're tempted to compete with Ireland, drop your tax rates so that your company has no incentive to go to Ireland where the tax rates are cheaper. This is called a race to the bottom. Every country, in order to hold on to the jobs it has, lowers its taxes. The end result is everywhere. Taxes on business are low and we don't get the services from the government, which isn't raising that money, or. Or we have to pay the taxes that the corporations have gotten out of. This is a great system, this competition of countries over tax rates. It's a great system for capitalists. It's a very bad system for the rest of us. And the rest of Europe is trying to tell the Irish can't play this anymore. We'll see how this plays out. Okay, I want to turn now to a question that again is coming from many of you. And before I do, let me remind you how to get questions to us here at Economic Update. Make use of our rdwolff with two f's.com and democracyatwork.info that's all one word. Democracyatwork.info both of those websites are not only interesting with the materials we upload onto them all the time. The courses, the interviews, the lectures, audio files, video files, written material. There's really a wealth of information there available to you without any charge. 24,7 make use of it. It's also a place where you can send us your comments, your criticisms, your questions so that we can respond on the air or via email, or shape the programs to deal with the issues you let us know are important to you. Also, our websites contain materials that help you be a partner for us. We want to ask you to share what we do on this program and what we put on our websites with other people who might be interested. The program as a whole, a part of it, teach people that there is this kind of service being provided. If they're interested, help them to access it. That's doing what we try to do and, and you can be a partner in that other ways that the websites can help you. Let us know if there's a radio station in your area that might be interested in carrying this program. We will follow up, talk to the folks there and move from the 50 stations that carry this program now to the hundred we hope to be carrying them soon. It's also a way, if you are interested in converting an existing business into a workers co op, into a. Which we talk about a great deal and which I'm about to in a moment. We now have a partner, a firm of accountants and lawyers and credit specialists who can make that happen, who can work with an employer or employees or both to convert a business and to do it in financially advantageous ways. Use our websites if you can. Let us know if there is such a business, what some of the contact information is and we will connect such a business workers employer both to this firm so that they can have a conversation and pursue this with the real technical specialists who know how to help you and who will do it in an honorable, committed way. Otherwise we would not have partnered with them. Okay, here's the question that many of you have sent me. If there were an economy that had been converted in general so that most enterprises were worker self directed enterprises, a co op based economy rather than a hierarchical, top down, capitalist based economy, would there be a place for small businesses? And if so, what would that place be? And many of you have asked it in different ways, but that's the basic question, so I wanted to answer as best I can to this very important question. So first of all let me assure you that the whole idea of building a cooperative economic system involves a transition from what we have now to that. And that's going to take time and that's going to go at different rates in different industries in different countries. And of course there will be during that transition all kinds of other enterprises. But there's a special position for small enterprises, and here's what it is. Whenever you organize an economy in a collective way, so that, for example, 200 workers in some enterprise will now become their own board of directors, they will convert it to a co op. They'll make the decisions together in a democratic way what to produce, how and where, and what to do with the profits. That kind of enterprise, which is democracy in the economy and is something that I support with great enthusiasm, can sometimes be slow to make changes, improve technology, new products, things like that. Many of you have written to me worried about that, because you kind of understand that whatever the benefits are of a democratic arrangement, you kind of have to talk your questions through and you have to talk your processes through. And it may be harder or slower to make changes, particularly big ones. Fine. Let's say that a society of co ops should create, would create the resources, the credits, the opportunities for inventive people to try new things, to set up new enterprises that explore a new technology or explore a new product, one that can do something better for people than what exists. Innovation, entrepreneurship. Will that exist in a co op economy? Absolutely. And the incentive will be there too. It'll work something like this. If you take a chance, work with a new technology, develop a new product, and you succeed in the sense that people want it and turn to you and buy what you produce, or it's distributed in some way that people approve, then you will make extra money. You will be the proprietor of this business, it'll be a small business and you can work it. And perhaps we'll let you work it any way you want. So there's a place for entrepreneurship, for innovation, and for small businesses, even small businesses, in which there's a leader and people that he or she hire. Yes, a small capitalist business. But here's where the democracy comes in. When the people who make that change retire reach that part of life when they don't want to do this anymore. If they do, or if they die at work because they love their job, fine. But when that generation that made the breakthrough is done, then the democracy kicks in. At that point it becomes a worker co op. Because the principle of democracy, the principle that all the people who work In a place who depend on what goes on in that place have a right as human beings to participate in deciding what goes on there. That kicks in after the first generation, let's call it that, started the business, that made the innovation. The children of an innovator are not the ones who should be in a position to control in an undemocratic way what happened. We can give that space to the first generation. The ones who make the breakthrough, the ones who make the innovation, they get the reward. They get that extra incentive. The society as a whole benefits, okay? But our commitment to democracy kicks in at the end of that generation, leaving the space in the next generation for the children of that entrepreneur or anybody else to again make that kind of breakthrough. So there would be a place for small businesses to get the benefit to all of society of allowing people who want to break the mold, who want to be unique, who have a brilliant new idea or who come up with something innovative to have their way to realize that project, to explore it, to see whether it works in the society, and to get the benefits when it does. And the society gets the benefits of their innovativeness and the democracy that is reaffirmed at the end of that innovator's productive life. I think that would be a way to accommodate what many of you are concerned about, the power of individual innovation within a commitment to democracy. And that's the kind of way of working these problems out that I suggest a cooperative economy of the future will find its way to achieve the and to institutionalize in its society. Okay, we've come to the end of the first half of this program, but before we leave for today, I wanted to mention a struggle that is going on that's going to become bigger, I suspect, in the years ahead. And so I'm not going to say much about it other than to alert you to it. The United States Chamber of Commerce, a professional lobbying institution of arguably the most important among all of the pro business lobbyists in the United States, has undertaken what is virtually a political war against something called the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. That is a new institution that came out of the Dodd Frank upset of our country, watching the illegal, unethical and so on behavior of our biggest banks in the collapse and meltdown of 2008 and 2009. It has been particularly championed by Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren, and she indeed, and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau are the targets of pretty intense public ads and campaigns funded and pushed by the Chamber of Commerce to get rid of that agency or to hamper it with rules and regulations that will make it impossible for it to protect the consumer, which it was established to do. The Chamber of Commerce is going to be appealing in ads of all kinds that many of you will see. They have the money. The government does not engage in return advertising. All that can happen is that those politicians who willing to buck the Chamber of Commerce, and those are few, will have whatever chance they have to use their positions as congressmen and women as senators. But that's an unfair fight, or at least it's a fight between those with very limited resources against the Chamber of Commerce that can draw on the bulk of American business for literally endless amounts of money if they can show that they're preventing the government from protecting the consumer against business. I'm putting aside what it means to have an economy where we have to protect the consumer, the majority against business, the minority, from exploitation and being ripped off and abused. I started many of my programs, as you know, telling you one or another story, whether it's about VW polluting the air or Toyota not giving us safe seat belts, whether Whole Foods is overcharging us for the packaged food and so on. I won't talk about that this time. But I will tell you that there is an important struggle between business and consumer protection that affects you, your children and your future. And it's one that's worth paying attention to. Please stay with me. We will have a very important and I think very interesting interview with when we return in a very short time. Welcome back to the second half of Economic Update for this Thanksgiving Day weekend, 2015. I am very proud to have with me again, and partly, by the way, because so many of you have written in asking me to bring back Dr. Harriet Fraad, who is a mental health counselor and a hypnotherapist with a private practice in New York City. And she also writes prolifically in a variety of places on politics, economics and how they intersect and interact with personal life. And that's indeed why I wanted to join with us today because as she will explain, there's been some recent research that has really touched precisely on the interaction between economics and personal life. And so this is a perfect opportunity to explore that. So thank you very much, Dr. Frad, for joining us.
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Great to be here.
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So tell us, if you will, in a few words, what is this new research, who performed it and what basically does it tell us?
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Well, it's a very recent study by Case and Deaton talking about a phenomenon which they are not the only people on which they're not the Only people who reported it. It's the phenomenon of middle aged white men, particularly those who are not college educated, having much higher levels of mortality, dying sooner, being addicted and dying often of things like alcoholism, cirrhosis of the liver, of drug overdoses, of opioid overdoses and depression, because depression certainly spurs a wish to die. Suicide has gone crazy, for example. It's five and a half times higher than it used to be for middle aged white men without college degrees. So that there is a phenomenon of people who used to be at the height of their careers feeling hopeful about life and having high health expectancies to be zooming downward at a rapid clip.
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Okay, just for the audience, Deaton is the same economist who won the Nobel prize this year, 2015. So he's very well recognized. I believe both Case and Deaton are at Princeton University in New Jersey, a very prestigious institution in the United States. So we have as qualified a set of researchers as one could hope for telling us and basically alarming us that a major part of our population, middle aged white men, are in terrible personal shape. So that's the research. Let me ask you as a practitioner, someone who has a private practice, have you seen in the clients that you see in the patients, you have evidence that supports or questions or qualifies what Deaton and Case have found?
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Well, what I see is just what Case and Deaton have found. What I see is that men who used to think that they were going somewhere and now can't are in terrible shape in the first place. They can't. You know, people who looked forward to continuing the hardware store they used to have or the drugstore they used to have, or the luncheonette they used to own are now replaced by places like Home Depot, by Walmart, by McDonald's. They don't have the future of a small business. They also don't have the future of well paying blue collar jobs. This crisis is across all groups, but it's most dramatic among white men without high school or high school and lower educational qualifications who used to be able to get jobs in things like construction, heavy machinery, high power sales. Those jobs have been robotized, computerized or outsourced to other countries. And so, and they're middle aged now, people don't want to hire them because they're going to get sicker faster and so that they are the last to be hired. And at the same time, one of the things that has happened is the economy has shifted so that the biggest sectors for jobs are things like food service and the lower level Medical trades, which were traditional pink collar jobs. And in addition to that, social service work, which has become the dominant employment, was associated with traditional women's jobs. Women have replaced men as the managers of almost everything because women's skills in conciliation and coordination and in defusing a situation rather than a kind of testosterone pushing are the ones that are needed. And so men have been demoted and that has converted itself in personal life to the higher rate of divorce now among middle aged people. And for the first time in our history, 69 point something, almost 70% of divorces are initiated by women. Because what happened is these men who grew up in a traditional way, that they would be the providers and that their wives would take care of house, home, children, and their personal needs, whether sexual or emotional, have that. They still have the mentality that women should serve them. But women are more frequently employed than they are. 40% of households have a primary wage earner who's a woman. And so they're not willing to come home and serve men and certainly can't full time the way these men are used to. And so that they're demoted at home as well as at the workplace. And they face a level of precarity and fear and instability in their marriages which they usually could count on before previously could count on and in their jobs. I have a client who used to have a little store and that store was outmoded by Walmart and therefore he went out of business. What happened is his wife became the more dominant person in the household because she was still working. And so his authority was reduced. The children looked at her rather than him. If he told them to do something, they looked at her to make sure she agreed. She started treating him as if he were a nobody and he was feeling suicidal. That's why the suicide rate is five and a half times greater than it used to be for middle aged blue collar workers or people without a college degree.
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White people, white people.
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And then she decided, look, you know, you're really not much of a man. I'm leaving and you're not a provider and you're making demands that are inappropriate. He wanted more sex, to assert himself that he was a man. And she thought, wait a minute, I come home tired, I'm providing for the family. He wanted her to make more meals to take care of him so he'd feel like more of a man. She thought, oh no you don't. You're home all day. And you know, the average unemployed man does less housework than his fully employed wife. So she thought I don't need this, and therefore rejected him. And he came to me with severe, severe depression and feelings of uselessness and a preoccupation with suicide. He's not the only one. I have another client who was a construction manager and his job has been outsourced because people get prefab construction or higher, lower cost immigrants. And his position at home is similarly demoted. And what his idea was and his hope for was that he would be constantly making more money, having the pride of being a provider for his family and having a wife who took care of his personal needs at home. That isn't happening. Not only that, I have another client who did find a job. But like most middle aged non educated white men as well as educated white men, the recession has meant the job he found is way beneath the one he used to have. So he can't make the share of household income he used to have. And his wife is furious that he has these expectations and she's exhausted. She went to school to have a higher paid job. The problem that a lot of blue collar men felt it was kind of unmanly to go to school, to keep going to school as an adult. And so they don't. The majority of higher educational students are women and blue collar men can't make a living and so that, you know, their interests diverge. His wife, who makes quite a bit of money as a pharmacist, a trade that is being taken over by women now that there are shifts in these big pharmacies because women can take care of children and still be a pharmacist. She put herself through school and her interests have diverged. He likes to hang out with his buddies, drink beer, go to the bar. He likes to watch TV for programs that she finds violent and stupid and she's getting ready to check out. So women won't, you know, women won't put up with what they used to and they're tired, there's no reason why they should. And so these men have been dispossessed both personally and economically and a lot of their sense of self worth was tied up with their net worth and they feel worthless.
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Well, you know, it's striking to me listening to you, that in a rational economic system that was putting a sizable part of its population, after all, middle aged white men is not a tiny part of our population. It's a major part of this culture. If you find that a part of your society is being particularly victimized by the way an economic system is working, in this case, you've Pointed to outsourcing of jobs, automation, and a variety of things, then a rational society would set up the programs and the institutions to address this part of the population's new and painful needs, to try to find solutions, whether that be in an educational program or a jobs program or a training program, a hundred ways of addressing this. And my sense is that there isn't anything that, in other words, this is just. You're on your own and you either decline into a depressed person and kill yourself, you kill yourself, you become homeless, you lose your family, you lose your connections. If you're lucky, perhaps you find a psychotherapist of one kind or another, a counselor, hypnotherapist, whatever that may help you at least identify that it's not your personal problem. You know, this is the United States, and we tend to make personal even the things that are or should be understood as social problems. Does your practice give you a sense of whether people, when they come to you, do they understand the broader socioeconomic changes that are bringing about their problems, or do they see it as a personal failure?
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They see it as a personal failure and they sink into personal dimensions of depression. You know, it's not like the 1930s when hundreds of thousands of unemployed people marched in the streets demanding jobs. We don't also have job programs to do the needed things to rebuild our infrastructure, which is crumbling. To have subways that work consistently, to have clean parks, to have after school programs, we don't have any of those things. And so that there aren't these jobs. And men are lost. And what's interesting is they've basically lost hope. A curious thing in the case and Deaton study is what they call the Hispanic paradox. Usually what happens is the poorer people are, the worse their health outcomes. Now, of course, that's if you have to go to a clinic and wait forever or you can't afford the health visit, you don't bother until you're terribly ill and then you go to an emergency room where people don't know you and where you wait forever and so on. And so a very remarkable thing has happened. Hispanic men who are high school educated or less, have greater life expectancies every year and less depression. Whereas white middle aged men, Hispanic middle aged men, are doing better and better. One of the reasons that America's health outcomes are among the. Well, they're the worst in the developed world and among the worst of any country that's industrialized and developed is because this wild discrepancy between the health care of the haves and the health care of the don't haves have nots. And so that what they're trying to figure out, why are middle aged Hispanic men doing so much better? Why don't they commit suicide as frequently?
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And what is the answer?
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Why do whites commit suicide? White middle aged non educated men commit suicide five and a half times more than Hispanic men of the same age group and education level. And what looks to be the case certainly for me and Case and Deaton share this idea is that for those Hispanic men, most of whom came recently from Mexico or Central America, life is better than it used to be. They're looking forward to being better providers, they're looking forward to a better life for their children. Their the work that they get is not as well paid, but for them it's much better than what they were used to. And so they have a sense of hope that they're doing better. Whereas for the white male, for the white blue collar male, he's doing worse than he ever expected and therefore his sense of himself and his future is different. That's why whites are now the biggest increase in heroin users. They're growing faster and faster in their addictions of every kind and they're dying more. Those are not healthy. Those addictions and hopelessness is correlated with bad health and depression.
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A
In a sense. This has always been known that it is not just a measure of what your standard of living is or your standard of working. It's also how it relates to your head, how you think of yourself, where you are in life or in change. If you think you're on the way up, then you can feel good about a low paid job. Whereas if it's on the way down for you, then the low job is the proof that you're sinking, that you're no good, that you're no good. And so we can understand how different groups. But it's very interesting that their research led them to see this issue once again. In these, in these lights, what do you as a practitioner, this is then a problem of the individual who's deeply depressed, but also of an economic system that is not treating large numbers of people very well. How do you juggle those two dimensions when you work with the folks that come to see you?
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Well, one is that I help those people see the social and political dimension of their suffering and also what they could do to change it.
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Let me interrupt you. You show them the political and social causes, influences producing their suffering. And you do that because what it relieves them at least of the self.
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Blame it Relieves them of the self blame. And it gives them a basis on which to reach out to others like them and connect with other people. So they're less fearful, isolated in their pain. One of the things that drives the lower health outcomes is that when you're depressed and anxious, your body responds to a crisis. You know, our crises when we were developing as a species was, you know, a large animal is pursuing us. And so therefore all immunity is depressed, all immune systems go down and a fight for survival is what happens. Well, if you're stressed all the time, your immune system is shut off and.
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You get sick and you get.
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You're much more susceptible to disease, as well as the psychological, social diseases like addiction, obesity and so on. You know that opioid addiction is huge in that population. Heroin addiction for the first time.
- [48:15]
A
So then telling or working with a person who comes to see you so that they understand that this is a socioeconomic process, not a personal failure, that this is in fact happening to millions of other people who didn't suddenly start failing. Having been perfectly good citizens up until, you know, the last decade or so. This is going to help them avoid the self destruction, physical and mental, that comes if you're alone, if you're isolated, and if you blame yourself for a problem that really isn't your doing.
- [48:54]
B
And it allows people to connect. I also see couples and explain to them that the women's liberation movement gave women a chance to hope for an expanded role. Not to necessarily devalue the nurturing work that they did at home, but to expand themselves into the workplace. But because that work was considered crap in part by the feminist movement and in part by men beneath them, they didn't learn what they could learn from taking care of a home and making it beautiful, of the excitement of watching children grow and helping empower them. And so that one of the things that couples need is they need to devalue the work that the society hasn't paid and hasn't valued, which is the work of creating a home, of making people comfortable, of emotional kindness, of nurturing of children, of creating creative meals which would then allow men to not feel humiliated by picking up a greater share of, of the household labor in terms of the decoration, of the cleaning, of the nurturing of children. And so that instead of a humiliation, which would be taking on some of those tasks, it becomes an opportunity, or it can become an opportunity which would allow the give and take between men and women to be better. Men's ways of asserting their masculinity won't be going out and drinking with their buddies as much as taking care of their kids and feeling like a good man for it. So that there are both personal ways and also social ways of both understanding what has happened. The callousness of capitalists who see only their own profit, regardless of the pain that they're inflicting, and also the opportunity in changing traditional gender roles that would allow marriages connections to exist and thrive instead of be frayed and destroyed.
- [51:08]
A
If you were given the opportunity to do so, what kind of social changes would you imagine could contribute to dealing with the problem that Case and Deaton have revealed and that your own practice has clearly also brought to your attention?
- [51:24]
B
Well, I would, you know, to reflect some of the work that you do, I would give men in the United States the same opportunity that men in Italy have under the Marcora law, which would be that the government would give them three years of their unemployment insurance upfront if they connected with other employed workers and created co ops. Because often these are very experienced men who really knew what they were doing and could create something useful and wonderful with other people who are unemployed. So that would be one solution. Another solution would be a whole re education and creating the FDR kind of jobs. If he for today's economy, I suppose it would be over 22 million jobs instead of the 11 million that FDR created to do the useful things our society needs and is way beyond whether it's changing the infrastructure, rebuilding the New York subways. I live here so really aware of that, and having night crews go over the system so that they wouldn't have be fixing the rail and changing the switchbox by rerouting everyone and cleaning up the stations the way they are in European countries, that there would. That's just one example. There's the highways, there's, you know, the parks. There's crumbling infrastructure everywhere you look. So that giving people socially useful jobs and at the same time having places where people, families, couples, individuals could go to talk about what's happening to them and connect with others, that they could create something together with those others, whether it's co ops or anything else.
- [53:25]
A
It would be wonderful, if you think about it, if we had again that WPA type program of the 1930s, perhaps this time setting it up not as government hiring you and you work, but as the government being the midwife of the development of a mass of cooperative enterprises that would say to people, okay, you've got a new life. The old economy can't provide for you. Here, here's a way that you can Go out, set up a business together with other people like yourself, and allow the whole society to see what it's like to have a big cooperative sector to your economy, side by side with the old traditional, and then let people decide, give the American people, quote, the freedom of choice between these two. And the way to do it is to do this, which is good for everybody, to have that freedom of choice by helping these people out of a situation that's not their fault, but is now driving them to a personal hell. If you like, we could do two good things out of this one bad thing that these people are being shunted aside.
- [54:31]
B
There's another thing too, which is that Denmark, which is supposed to be the most successful economy, and Germany, a wildly successful economy, as well as Sweden, a successful economy, have heavy prices for people to outsource. If you're outsourcing, you have to get someone another job. You have to provide for them. You have to deal with the economic impact on your community and the health impact on your community. So we could stop the free ride of abandoning American workers. But also, in addition to those things, and. And in addition to the WPA ideology, which is wonderful, I think you need to add a personal thing because gender relationships are changing. The overwhelming number of women are in the labor force, women are rejecting men. And you need to really deal with the psychology of personal life in neighborhood organizations and giving people a chance to talk about what happened to them personally. Because there's a personal shift and there's personal precarity in addition to economic precarity. There's a personal terror of not having a future which is going right along with the economic terror. And in the Hispanic families, that's much less so because they still have more of the traditional structure. Not that I think that's a great structure, but that they can count on it and they're looking forward to something else.
- [56:05]
A
You know, the ironies here are endless. In most economics courses, you're taught as though if the corporation pursues maximum profit, it's good for the whole society. You're never presented with the enormous costs of capitalist competition and what it means and what it can do to a community. And nothing illustrates it more than this conversation. We've come to the end of our time. Dr. Farad, thank you very, very much for joining us. It's a pleasure and reminding us that to do economics properly, you have to take into account all of its social conditions and all of its social consequences, or else you will not be doing neither the analytic nor your role as a citizen. The justice it deserves. We've come to the end of our time, folks. Thank you very much for joining us. Please make use of our websites, rdwolff, with two f's.com and democracy at work. I want to thank truthout.org that remarkable independent source of news and analysis. Do check them out@truthout.org and I look forward to speaking with you again when December begins next week. Your time now, baby but after a while Gonna be my time My time, babe they ain't gonna change. Ain't change they ain't gonna change yes, it' it.